Very confused about frequent reports of performance issues.

[Teariel]

Hi everyone.

As the title says, I'm very confused about all the performance issues people are reporting with the latest update (2.2 Le Guin). I do not have a ridiculously powerful computer, and i'm not having any issues at all performance wise. I was curious what kind of hardware people are running the game on and possibly what specifically seems to be causing the performance drop late game. I've heard lots of people saying it seems to be related to trade routes (Especially when gateways are added in).

I'm seeing posts about people saying how disappointed they are with Paradox as a company, and that Paradox doesn't care about the game or the players. Everyone will have their own reasons for having those opinions, but I personally haven't experienced many of the issues that people are complaining about and I hoped maybe I could help calm the hate with an opinion from the other side of the table.

I've played multiple games on Huge galaxies with different styles of empires (Tall, wide, machine, hive, megacorp, etc) and have made it beyond the year 2450 with minimal drops in performance to framerate and no hangs or stutters. My framerate is on average about 80, going down to 75 in later stages. I encourage people who are having performance issues as well as people that aren't to share their settings, hardware and specific experience when they are having these performance losses.

I have the game in 3840x2160 resolution with graphics quality and bloom quality on high, and multisample level on 8.

My system is;

Intel I5-8400 (Corsair H115i cooler)
Asus Strix Z370-E Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance DDR4 2666MHz CL16 dual channel memory (2x8GB)
Asus ROG Strix GTX 1080 Graphics Card (Driver Ver. 417.35)
Samsung 960 PRO NVMe M.2 SSD
Corsair HX1000i Platinum power supply
Windows 10 home

I'm sure Paradox will address the issues as soon as they are able. In my opinion they are a professional company with far above average community support and interaction and I have no reason to doubt them when it comes to the issues and concerns with this latest update. That I am overall enjoying!

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

I play on a potato and while the game certainly slows down a tad more than it used to, the increasing lag as the in-game date progresses has always been a problem.

People just have no patience, IMO.

 

[Teariel]

We're all liars, obviously.

We all lie about stuff, sure. But I doubt everyone is lying about their performance issues. I hoped I could encourage people that are having those issues by sharing my experience so far. Just trying to be constructive.

 

[Annihilat0r]

First of all, your system is definitely in the top 10%.

Secondly, performance is very subjective. The framerate is not a good measure in this case, because the problem many players (including me) are having is the increasing time it takes for the game calculate the daily ticks, including microstutters on every every tick. In lategame, it can easily take over a minute to adavance a single month on fastest. You should rather post those numbers if you actually want to contribute to the discussion, although I think it's pretty pointless to be honest. The majority of the players is unhappy and the devs finally did acknowledge the problem, so let's assume they will be working on it. Your post might have good intentions, but won't make anyone who is having problems feel better.

 

[AlureddeValer]

First of all, your system is definitely in the top 10%.

Secondly, performance is very subjective. The framerate is not a good measure in this case, because the problem many players (including me) are having is the increasing time it takes for the game calculate the daily ticks, including microstutters on every every tick. In lategame, it can easily take over a minute to adavance a single month on fastest. You should rather post those numbers if you actually want to contribute to the discussion, although I think it's pretty pointless to be honest. The majority of the players is unhappy and the devs finally did acknowledge the problem, so let's assume they will be working on it. Your post might have good intentions, but won't make anyone who is having problems feel better.

This. Framerate is not so much a problem since it very subjective. The problems I've been hearing about are the microstutters. I personally don't encounter it, but the tips about going into the settings.txt file and reducing shadow size and turning off AA did help boost the performance a little bit.

 

[Teariel]

First of all, your system is definitely in the top 10%.

Secondly, performance is very subjective. The framerate is not a good measure in this case, because the problem many players (including me) are having is the increasing time it takes for the game calculate the daily ticks, including microstutters on every every tick. In lategame, it can easily take over a minute to adavance a single month on fastest. You should rather post those numbers if you actually want to contribute to the discussion, although I think it's pretty pointless to be honest. The majority of the players is unhappy and the devs finally did acknowledge the problem, so let's assume they will be working on it. Your post might have good intentions, but won't make anyone who is having problems feel better.

I fully understand what you’re saying about frame rate, which is why I also said I’m having zero stutters or hangs. The game runs as smoothly at year 2450 and it does at year 2300.

 

[Losttruppen]

Stellaris has always had a lot of complaints about slowdown in the late game, not in framerate but the daily ticks as Annihilat0r said. When paused my game runs fine but past 2300 even it starts to crawl and I'm well above the recommended specs.

I think the big issue people have with this patch is the fact the big economy change was supposed to fix this somewhat and ease the strain on the AI lategame, which it has not. I think people have a right to complain about how paradox handled this patch due to increasing worry about adding more technical dept with each patch on an already old engine, and this clearly was an issue that should have been looked at more closely before they went on holidays or postpone the release until it was ready instead of dropping it with DLC in the hope of catching the christmas sales.

 

[Teariel]

Stellaris has always had a lot of complaints about slowdown in the late game, not in framerate but the daily ticks as Annihilat0r said. When paused my game runs fine but past 2300 even it starts to crawl and I'm well above the recommended specs.

I think the big issue people have with this patch is the fact the big economy change was supposed to fix this somewhat and ease the strain on the AI lategame, which it has not. I think people have a right to complain about how paradox handled this patch due to increasing worry about adding more technical dept with each patch on an already old engine, and this clearly was an issue that should have been looked at more closely before they went on holidays or postpone the release until it was ready instead of dropping it with DLC in the hope of catching the christmas sales.

I definitely wasn’t intending to say people didn’t have the right to complain about the issues they’re having, or that they’re not having them to begin with. I would be extremely frustrated if I wasn’t able to play the game because of performance issues and luckily I’m not having any. There’s so many negative posts, I just wanted to share a positive experience.

 

[ImbaXenoSnipar]

Here's a thread with over 300 replies and plenty of information about the stuttering problem. There are videos of the stutter, many specs, many savegame file you can try, etc.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...tch-has-rendered-the-game-unplayable.1136332/

So far, there have been several people there claiming they have no lag or stutter. All of them either refused to upload gameplay video showing the lag-free and stutter-free gameplay or they eventually admitted they had stutter which they didn't see previously.

Why don't you go and post there. maybe even record a video of your gameplay? Just download one of the problematic savegame files, whip out your phone and record. Make sure to move the camera around and run the game at max speed.

There's also another thread where a wizard has done some serious tests showing the performance is twice as bad as it was in 2.1:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-performance-analysis-2.1143652/

 

[prismaticmarcus]

We all lie about stuff, sure. But I doubt everyone is lying about their performance issues. I hoped I could encourage people that are having those issues by sharing my experience so far. Just trying to be constructive.

encourage them to do what?

 

[prismaticmarcus]

Sorry, you failed. I've got practically the same system you have and I'm not having the la-de-da lovely day ain't it performance polaza you are. For fear of the moderator slap, your first post on these forums comes off as an apologist, dismissive of a problem that many are having. Because, like I said, we're all bloody liars.

it sounded more like humblebragging to me

 

[Had a dad]

First of all, your system is definitely in the top 10%.

Secondly, performance is very subjective. The framerate is not a good measure in this case, because the problem many players (including me) are having is the increasing time it takes for the game calculate the daily ticks, including microstutters on every every tick. In lategame, it can easily take over a minute to adavance a single month on fastest. You should rather post those numbers if you actually want to contribute to the discussion, although I think it's pretty pointless to be honest. The majority of the players is unhappy and the devs finally did acknowledge the problem, so let's assume they will be working on it. Your post might have good intentions, but won't make anyone who is having problems feel better.

even if framerate was a good benchmark, my system is more beefy then his in everything except the GPU (mine is a 1070) and I've had some saves I've tested strangle one of the cores causing the lag/ stutter most complain about. Different playstyles will def produce different results as some of the issues seem to be tied to some specific things. He might be playing in a way that masks performance issues.

 

[alexti]

It appears that depending on what happens in the game the performance can deteriorate very badly. This includes the player's style, but also what random AI empires are present and what they are doing. I had games where I had little performance issues and games where performance got very bad past certain point.